"The new paling of the manor-house garden is being painted green. Dry wood rots in wind and weather if not covered with a coating. Nature furnishes a secure vestment for all her creatures: men tear off these natural coats and are compelled to replace them with artificial ones.
"What if education were nothing more than oil-paint, a poor surrogate for the fresh lustre of Nature? No: it is Nature itself, elevated, purified; men like those around me here----
"Valentine, the old carpenter, is so forgetful that he walks along the road with the cart-whip on his shoulder, and cries 'Hoy!' without perceiving that his cows have turned into a wrong road forty yards behind him. Is not this the lot of many rulers?
"In a garden by the roadside is a weeping willow, the boughs of which have been tied and twisted into all sorts of ellipses, circles, oblique and right angles, until they have taken this shape permanently.
"The boughs of sorrow are tractable, and may be cramped into almost any deformity; still, the irrepressible vigor of Nature will restore the original growth and proportion. What is it that makes farmers so fond of distorting Nature? Why are they so prone to maltreat the weeping willow, the loveliest of trees? Perhaps there lies at the very root of human nature a disposition to indemnify one's self for a year's hard labor by making a plaything of the subject of it on a holiday.
"(At the crucifix in the Target Field.) Although there were some Jews living in the place where I was born, I never thought much about them. I only remember that when a little boy, like the other little boys, I jeered and even struck the little Jews at every opportunity.
"It as little occurs to us to meditate upon our relation to the Jews as upon that we hold to horses or other cattle. On the contrary, the Bible inspires every Christian child with an indistinct impression of having received some personal wrong at the hands of every individual of the Jewish persuasion. A mysterious abhorrence of them gradually settles upon the infant mind. I involuntarily regarded every Jew as having some disease of the skin. A child thus educated will caress an animal, but never a Jew.